Somehow, the daylight has come in upon the magic. Never again will Concorde have the majestic, awe-inspiring cachet of one fantastic dream fulfilled. Its aura of unreal, almost surreal, invincibility is gone, its spell is broken, and as the myth portrayed it many centuries ago, a once sublimely graceful creature has proved to be, when things go wrong, ridiculously impotent against the law of gravity:
...with melting wax and loosened strings,
Sank hapless Icarus on his faithless wings;
Headlong he rushed through the affrighted air,
With limbs distorted and dishevelled hair. The technological challenges surmounted to bring Concorde into being have been extensively described in recent days. But strangely enough, even 30 years ago, the aircraft was an easy customer for meteorologists to satisfy. And that remains the case. Concorde is less vulnerable to weather than its subsonic cousins. It flies far above the active weather zone, between 50,000 and 60,000 ft above the ground, and has 90 per cent of the atmosphere below it when at cruising level. Conventional jets fly in that zone of the atmosphere, around 35,000 ft, where the strongest winds are likely to occur, and not uncommonly they may encounter head-winds or tail-winds of 150 m.p.h. or more. These may be up to 30 per cent of the airspeed of the aircraft, and can therefore affect the duration of a long flight by something like an hour. Concorde, on the other hand, flies where the winds are significantly lighter, and cruises at three times the speed of a subsonic plane; minor variations in the wind strength have little impact on its flight-time.
In addition, there are few unpleasant meteorological surprises at Concorde's cruising altitude. Turbulence, for example, because of the very light winds, is encountered only very rarely, and even then is very slight indeed. Accurate forecasts are still important in the climbing and descending phases - but that, after all, is very familiar territory for the meteorologist.
The other major meteorological controversy concerning supersonic aircraft in the early days was the fear that emissions of nitrogen oxides from their engines would deplete the ozone layer. The fears were not without foundation, given that such aircraft were expected to increase in number as the years went by. But this did not happen, and in any event when an "ozone hole" was discovered over Antarctica a decade later, it became obvious that there was a much more immediate threat to parts of the ozone layer than any posed by a half a dozen Concordes.